HOW IS LONGEVITY CREATED?

New blog out today on Patreon: It is called QUANTUM ENGINEERING #3: LIGHT & TIME = HEALTHSPAN

Uncle Jack, can you tell us briefly what the blog is about?

Claude Shannon showed that any communications channel — a cell, a telephone line, a radio band, a fiber-optic cable — could be characterized by two factors: bandwidth and noise. Bandwidth is the range of electronic, optical, or electromagnetic frequencies that can be used to transmit a signal; noise is anything that can disturb that signal.

Given a channel with particular bandwidth and noise characteristics, Shannon showed how to calculate the maximum rate at which data can be sent over it with zero error. He called that rate the channel capacity, but today, it’s just as often called the Shannon limit.

In a noisy channel, the only way to approach zero error is to add some redundancy to a transmission. For instance, if you were trying to transmit a message with only three bits, like 001, you could send it three times: 001001001. If an error crept in, and the receiver received 001011001 instead, they could be reasonably sure that the correct string was 001.

Any such method of adding extra information to a message so that errors can be corrected is referred to as an error-correcting code. The noisier the channel (inflammation), the more information (sunlight) you need to add to compensate for errors. As codes get longer, however, the transmission rate goes down (aging): you need more bits to send the same fundamental message. So the ideal code would minimize the number of extra bits while maximizing the chance of correcting errors.

By that standard, sending a message three times is actually a terrible code. It cuts the data transmission rate by two-thirds since it requires three times as many bits per message, but it’s still very vulnerable to error: two errors in the right places would make the original message unrecoverable.

But Shannon knew that better error-correcting codes were possible. In fact, he was able to prove that for any communications channel, there must be an error-correcting code that enables transmissions to approach the Shannon limit.

His proof written in 1948, however, didn’t explain how to construct such a code. Instead, it relied on probabilities (Quantum Mechanics). Say you want to send a single four-bit message over a noisy channel. There are 16 possible four-bit messages. Shannon’s proof would assign each of them its own randomly selected code — basically, its own serial number. Sunlight is a bar code to transfer information from our star to our mitochondria by way of our cells. How close we get to the Shannon limit determines how healthy we are and how long we live.

Consider the case in which the channel is noisy enough that a four-bit message requires an eight-bit code. The receiver, like the sender, would have a codebook that correlates the 16 possible four-bit messages with 16 eight-bit codes. Since there are 256 possible sequences of eight bits, there are at least 240 that don’t appear in the codebook. If the receiver receives one of those 240 sequences, she knows that an error has crept into the data. But of the 16 permitted codes, there’s likely to be only one that best fits the received sequence — that differs, say, by only a digit.

Shannon showed that, statistically, if you consider all possible assignments of random codes to messages, there must be at least one that approaches the Shannon limit. The longer the code, the closer you can get: eight-bit codes for four-bit messages wouldn’t actually get you very close, but two-thousand-bit codes for thousand-bit messages could. Sunlight creates the Shannon limit for cells. This has big implications for humans who abuse man-made light.

Of course, the coding scheme Shannon described is totally impractical: a codebook with a separate, randomly assigned code for every possible thousand-bit message wouldn’t begin to fit on all the hard drives of all the computers in the world. But Shannon’s proof held out the tantalizing possibility that, since capacity-approaching codes must exist, there might be a more efficient way to find them. Mother Nature found out that secret sauce and uses it in all living things cells. This blog below tells you about that code.

Here is the link to the blog: https://www.patreon.com/posts/quantum-3-light-58493297